Free The Future of Success by Robert B. Reich Page B

to this view by once using the term “symbolic analyst” to describe the top tier of workers, almost all well educated, who apply systemic thought to identifying and solving problems. Because the new technologies involve symbols and speed analysis, and because the advent of the personal computer roughly coincided with the time when the incomes of well-educated workers began to rise quickly relative to less-educated workers, it seems a logical inference that computers and related technologies are directly responsible. Further, it would seem likely that an education stressing analytic skills of a sort that would complement the new technologies is the best preparation for the work of the future. But these assumptions were, and are, incorrect.
    In fact, many of the people who are gaining the most value in the new economy aren’t especially skilled in using computers or other information technologies. Their value is only tangentially related to their computational prowess or capacity to solve complex problems. They are not even any longer accurately described as “knowledge workers,” because any particular body of knowledge is now so easily encoded into software. The real value these people add to the economy derives instead from their creativity—their insights into what can be done in a particular medium (software, finance, law, entertainment, music, physics, and so on), what can be done for a particular market, and how best to organize work in order to bring these two perspectives together. They are
creative
workers.
    My former student has no particular technical expertise. She majored in art. But she apparently has a wellspring of good ideas about how people might want to be linked in cyberspace through giant games they can play together. Her value turns on her inventiveness and her insights into the market, rather than her knowledge of digital technology.
    The new information technologies are important, but their effects are indirect: They magnify good ideas. Technology increases the value of creativity by allowing it to be spread quickly throughout an organization’s network and, ultimately, to consumers. As noted, it also gives consumers more choices, and thus increases the pressure on all sellers to innovate. Great ideas are the new currency of the realm. Information technology is the bank that circulates the coins ever more efficiently. 2
    Some people may be more creative than others owing to innate talents, perhaps found in genes somehow linked to creative insight. But much of creativity has to do with the families and circumstances you’re born into. Parenting is important. Later, I’ll share with you evidence about the long-term effects on infants and toddlers of receiving a lot, or a little, caring attention, and I’ll present some tentative evidence about the effects of the community in which a child is raised. Surely, education is crucial. Despite the unfortunate fact that most schools are still organized around the old industrial model in which children are treated like unfinished auto parts moving along a conveyor belt, which teachers try to bang, twist, and mold into shape as they pass, formal education does at least teach most of us to read and thus gain access to a world of ideas. It also links us to history and to methods of argument and means of experimentation, all of which are useful in the pursuit of new ideas. Some of us have been lucky enough to be inspired by a great teacher who opened our minds and eyes to new possibilities around us and inside us. Higher education gives us tools to discover even more. And as I will explain later in fuller detail, a good university also connects us with people who can utilize our ideas and profitably direct our energies. Undeniably, the incomes of people with more years of schooling continue to rise relative to people with fewer years.
    GEEKS
    At the core of innovation lie two distinct personalities, representing different inclinations, talents, and ways of